From a giant toothbrush to a car tyre tutu, there’s a giraffe’s torso and a box from cremated ashes: the precious, the profane all in a beautiful conglomeration. There is respect both earnest and cynical paid to deceased mothers and representations of the horror of hate that leaves you queasy.
From the outset, ‘Great Yarmouth: Provisional Figures’ directed by Marco Martins is an intense, astounding and difficult film to watch. It is beautifully edited and supremely well cast and performed, but the underlying moral degradation central to the grand narrative here is punishing to stomach. And even harder to watch.
Replete with cruelty, nakedness, burning incense and song that will reach into the very chambers of your heart, ‘The Black Circus and the Republic of Bantu’ is much more of a ritual than a spectacle. You emerge from the experience with a seismic sense in your gut. Something has happened.
With her impish gap-toothed grin and her sprite-like existence onstage and in the interstices of the stories she told, fearless and impetuous dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo leaves a brilliant legacy that radically shifted an understanding of what dance from South Africa can and should be, anywhere in the world.
SAY THE WORD ‘Fiddler’ in the film context to virtually anyone you meet, and they will know exactly what you mean. Fiddler on the Roof is like Van Gogh’s ear or Beethoven’s Fifth, in a broader cultural sphere. It’s also up there as the pinnacle of shlock culture […]
TAKE AN HISTORICAL site of worship that shrieks 1980s community in South Africa. Rattle its proverbial bones with the shadows and demons of what was profoundly taboo to that sense of community, then. Toss in some harsh lights, a dash of stage smoke and doef-doef music to make […]
NON-BINARY SOUTH AFRICAN performance artist Dean Hutton has stood on the outside looking in, for most of their life. While this may be a horribly lonely position for a child, it is one of supreme potency for an artist at the summit of their personal, political and artistic […]
WHO CAN EVER pooh-pooh the pathos and tragedy of Tevye the dairyman? Living in a small shtetl in an Eastern European place called Anatevka, which is threatened by rising anti-Semitism, this character, penned by the inimitable Sholem Aleichem from 1894 is the profoundly religious father of five feisty […]
THE IDEA OF writing a conventional tribute to Linda Givon, the founder of the Goodman Gallery, who died suddenly on 5 October 2020, at 84, seems trite. This is because she was much more than the pedestrian sum of her parts. She was born, educated, married, divorced, widowed. […]
FILM REVIEW: CUNNINGHAM. HE REFUSED TO be known as ‘avant-garde’, but set fire to every dance cliché and rule that you can think of, in his outstanding and bold repertoire, answerable to no one. This was Merce Cunningham, celebrated in Alla Kovgan’s beautiful film, Cunningham, which features on […]
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